King Lear

By Cameron Woodhead, Reviewer

30 July 2007 — 10:00am

Trevor Nunn's King Lear opens amid pomp and majesty, with the entire court prostrate before the power of the king. It is a vision of all that this savage tragedy will strip away, and it recalls, as the monarch nods and dithers wordlessly over his subjects, something that Lear raves in his madness: "Even a dog's obeyed in office."

Lear is a role that has defeated great actors (Olivier, notably, waited too long to play it). But Ian McKellen is at the height of his powers. And he crafts an unforgettable performance that will, in all probability, set a new benchmark for this century, as Scofield's did for the last.

From the outset, the seeds of Lear's downfall are firmly planted. The king's erratic behaviour is amplified during the map scene. In a wry knock at George Bush, McKellen stilts through his abdication speech, squinting at notes. After disinheriting Cordelia, he bellows "Nothing!" at Burgundy through the hole in his crown - a visual foreshadowing of the many puns the Fool makes on the subject.

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King Lear is full of the vilest imprecations Shakespeare could concoct and McKellen instils the high-voltage rhetoric with a withering charge. When Lear curses his daughter Goneril with sterility, she quakes and falls - and it doesn't seem like overacting because the words fly at you like a flurry of stabs.

What makes Lear a compelling tragic figure is that his talent for inflicting misery on those closest to him is outstripped by his extraordinary capacity to suffer. The former is easier to achieve than the latter, and it is a tribute to McKellen that his trajectory through rage and madness into oblivion generates such horror, pity and awe.

For the real test of a Lear isn't in the thundering rhetoric - it is in the moments where Shakespeare stretches words themselves on the rack: Lear's infamous howl, or his "never, never, never, never" over the dead body of Cordelia. Even here McKellen is relentlessly assured, capturing brilliantly the appalling desolation of the closing scene.

Lear's villainous daughters Goneril (Frances Barber) and Regan (Monica Dolan) are marvellous: they sparkle with malice, but are allowed a more human dimension in the face of the king's rambunctious and vicious qualities. Cordelia (Romola Garai) is every bit her father's daughter - headstrong and defiant in the face of Lear's folly, martial in his defence and steadfast in forgiveness.

As the Fool, Sylvester McCoy provides a bittersweet companion to the king, clowning, singing and playing the spoons.

William Gaunt is a spry and avuncular Gloucester, teeming with the natural warmth that McKellen's Lear lacks. Philip Winchester is a glamorous Edmund, almost a poster boy for evil. Ben Meyjes' Edgar makes a striking contrast as a homely scholar, with a mud-spattered and physically exacting stint as Tom o' Bedlam.

As a director of Shakespeare, Nunn's particular genius is that the visual and textual aspects of his imagination are as indispensable to each other as the chambers of the heart. And in this King Lear, visual metaphors abound. When Lear describes Poor Tom as a "poor, bare, forked animal", for instance, before ripping off his own garments, Nunn has Tom lying on his back, his legs spread wide. The point of no return in Lear's madness comes as the red velvet of the court is stripped away, the rafters sundered.

It is a swift and sure production, one that manages to wring a fair amount of comedy from the text. Although given the play's verbal viciousness (Shakespeare wields his words as weapons of mass destruction, with bodies flayed, scalded, mutilated, set on wheels of fire, so that the world itself becomes an instrument of torture), this is not so much comic relief as a whetting of the dramatic knife. The horror is compounded when Fool is arbitrarily hanged and the stage invaded by men with guns.

It is a great privilege to have seen the Royal Shakespeare Company perform King Lear. With richly interpretive direction, a brilliant cast and a searing performance from Ian McKellen in the title role, it is a production that will be talked about for generations to come.